As I mentioned in the last post, in October I became obsessed.  All summer and throughout the entire Tour de Fleece it felt like I was in crisis mode. Then as Fall descended, I began working on things outstanding.  I probably put in a couple of hundred hours at various computers. I needed a break from all of the adulting.  In the back of my mind, there were so many craft projects started and unfinished.  This is something I don’t often do.  I’m largely a serial crafter and often don’t have more than a home project and a travel project on the go at once.

When I started the Tour de Fleece this year – before all the drama started – I had 5 PHDs (Projects Half Done) of which 3 qualified as UFOs.  During the tour, I finished 2 of the projects, turned one UFO into 2 PHDs and one abandoned project, and started one new project.  Here’s what the “To do list” looked like at the end of the tour:

Those were the official projects.  I also had an unofficial weaving project and a knitting project. The weaving project was a bunch of card woven bands on an inkle loom and they were finished during the tour.  The knitting was to find a yarn for a sweater I wanted to knit and I ended up swatching 3 different yarns before I made gauge. I plonked along in July because I was encouraged to keep going for the stress relief when I said I was dropping out to do a surprise gutting of the basement. August saw one of the UFOs finished and one sweater started. September meant 2 more finishes.  In retrospect, this is pretty good production for any year.

That meant I went into October with 3 projects in progress.  Why did I feel so overwhelmed?  Maybe because 2 of them were UFOs from 2022 and one I felt like I had a deadline on.  Around this time too Bandit started heading for the loom room after lunch, instead of his usual outside in the back yard time which had been our routine since around April.  Since no time in the loom room is unsupervised, I started spending more time in there too.

The October obsession started slowly. I decided to commit to finally dealing with the largest of the 2 UFOs – learning to use a charkha and spinning cotton.  That was a major thing mostly because I spin with my fibre in my right hand and have virtually no dexterity for the fibre in my left.  This is most common for a left handed spinner but I am right handed.  Extremely right-handed as we’ve been learning in the past few months.  More on that in a bit.  Charkhas with one modern notable exception are almost exclusively built with the drive wheel on the right and the spindle on the left – requiring you to draft with your left hand.  Not unlike a great wheel.  It’s very hard to find one of those in a right hand /fibre hand configuration too – which is a really good thing because it means I won’t look for yet another huge piece of fibre equipment to shoehorn into this house.  That said, I can now draft with my left hand. hmmmm…

I planned about 1.5 months for this learning process.  That was based on how long it took to spin up one puni – multiplied out by about how many punis I thought I’d be carding out of the 200g of cotton that I had. I mentally split the project into 2 spinning projects.  One of the punis and I planned to spin the rest of the fibre as it had arrived – in a roving.  So let’s call that 4 projects now.

By the end of the first week and a half though, I was becoming more comfortable and picking up speed.  I started to think I could finish by the end of the month if I tried. And alone, that’s not too bad really – about 45 minutes to an hour a day of spinning is pretty reasonable.

But you see, there was also the sweater I’d started and for some reason I can’t even remember now, I really wanted to finish it by the first week of November.

That’s black Merino/Vicuna and a blue silk single held together.

Also a friend is relearning to weave with my guidance and in order to guide her, I wanted to weave off a project that would refresh my weaving memory. Weaving is something I’ve never done quickly.  I tend to plan a warp, beam it onto the loom then pick away at it over a period of months.  This time though, I wanted to get through the process fairly quickly, so I could stay ahead of the friend’s progress.  To help that, October 10th, I beamed a band onto the loom that I’d already dyed the yarn for and wound the warp for back in 2021.  In theory, that saved me a fair bit of time.  More still if I hadn’t dropped the lease sticks and had one fall out and lost the cross but that’s simple klutziness.

Alright, so now we’re up to 5 projects – 4 of them active. A little chaotic but still manageable.  The flax was still there in the back of my mind but really that’s a summer project to me (it’s easier on my floors if I wet spin flax outside.) so I was able to set that one mentally aside.

Then there was a knitted square for a project.  It needed to be a certain size, so I needed to swatch and was prepared to rip and re-knit once I found a gauge that worked. It was due by the end of the year or so.

That’s 6 projects for anyone still keeping track.  Meanwhile, I was becoming increasingly obsessed with clearing this “to do” list. And you know what?  A month of obsessive crafting and I did it.  Well, not quite cleared the list but made it more manageable.

The knitted block had been swatched, ripped and reknitted by the 18th.

The woven band took me 9 days to weave off and was off the loom by the 20th. A record for me.

So now we’re down to 4 projects.  Hey!  Why not start another weaving project?  ugh.  I beamed the last of my already wound warps on the 22nd.  Auditioned some weft yarns and… didn’t like anything.  Had to dye a weft yarn to work with the warp.  Because of course I did.  I was weaving again by the 25th. So, we’re back up to 5 projects.

I wound off the last of 3 skeins of cotton on October 28th. There was a total length of 1375yds of 3 ply and it’s a decent match for a commercial 2/8 cotton.   We counted this as 2 projects, so down to 3.

The sweater came off the needles around the same time. Down to 2 projects…

The 2nd weaving project came off the loom on the 29th.  I’d beaten the record I just set. One project left.  Just the flax for the spring.

You’d think that would mean I’d relax.  No.  November 3, I brought the CSM back out of mothballs and tried to start remembering what I’d learned last year.

And started 3 new spinning projects.

One support spindle project to tutor someone at our knitting/spinning group. This is silk brick that I dyed maybe a year ago?  I have no notes on it at all so I’m guessing.

A suspended spindle project for an on the go project. This is  “Blue Morpho Butterfly” Merino/Silk from Little Blue Fibre Studio on one of my tiny 3D printed spindles.

An eSpinner project that I can always transfer to my Lendrum folding wheel if I want as my stay home (or carry to the library) project. This is Silk/Camel, in colorway “Yeah, But She’s Our Witch” (discontinued colourway) from The Fibre Goddess.

Apparently I’m not a serial crafter anymore?

The whole month of October, I knew I was procrastinating on things.  I’d promised to put in a stock order at SMS – I had committed to testing the new Pfaff 1222 power switches as well as needing some things to finish up some projects here.  That was supposed to go in at the beginning of September but I just kept waiting, feeling like I’d forgotten something I needed which is strange because I am pretty disciplined about putting anything I need into my order spreadsheet.  I shouldn’t have forgotten anything.

More on the switches in the next post – when hopefully I will have installed one and have some feedback.

As November started, I headed back to the computer to put that order in with SMS and continue with previewing photo editing software.  While I was doing this, I started processing the photos I’d taken with my old DSLR and found that there were a lot more that were worth a revisit than I’d originally thought.

In the meantime, we still headed out a couple of weekends to take photos but I was noticing that the tendons in my right arm that were upset while we were doing renos/repairs in the summer were getting progressively worse.  What was “sore” while holding the camera in August had become painful, weak and dropping things by the end of October. The lump on my thumb didn’t seem to be getting any better either and it was seriously affecting grip strength because it would sound off if I touched it and everything touches it – grabbing a mouse, screwdriver, a lathe chisel, travel mug, tripod or the handle of a CSM. All would make it hurt or go numb. Many nights, I’d wake up with part of my hand/fingers numb.  Increasingly too, my wrist and thumb were “jammed up”.

At my November chiropractor appointment, we decided it was time to find out what I’d done.  Or I guess we knew what I’d done, we wanted to know the extent of the damage. The imaging confirmed what we suspected. I’m officially to Rest, Ice, Compress and Elevate the inner and outer tendons at the elbow (and the ulnar nerve) and similarly the ganglion cyst and degenerative damage I’ve done to my thumb. I’m to switch to mousing with my left hand and rest the right as much as possible.  My teeth do not appreciate the lack accuracy my left hand has when wielding a mug of tea and I’m about 1/4 as efficient with the mouse.

Around the same time, Bandit seems to have stepped right into his role as power cuddler or nurse kitty because he’s started pinning me in my chair for a few hours each afternoon and at night if I don’t go to bed before he arrives. He’s also enlisted Grey and I’m seldom without some sort of furry enforcer on my lap lately.  As I write this, Bandit is entering hour 3 on my lap and my bladder is beginning to object.

I’m trying to limit myself to an hour on the computer a day (since mousing irritates my thumb especially but my elbow as well) and 30 minutes of spinning and catching up on some of my reading.  It’s becoming a lesson in acceptance – i.e. I can’t always accomplish everything in a day that I want to and I have to accept that for the next little bit because if I heal now, next summer doesn’t have to suck while I try to heal then instead.

It seems like the theme of this year has been obsession.  It’s not a trend I hope to continue.  Perhaps I can find a way to dial some of this back to “healthy interest” which is more my usual style.

OK.  That officially bubbles the Pfaff switches to the top of my list.  I promise to enlist Ryan’s help for the heavy lifting part, since I barely managed to get the first Pfaff onto my bench when I tried it alone the other day.

Today’s Post Title inspired by Animotion – Obsession This video is so incredibly 80s and really strange!